if you read Ballmer's comment at the end carefully, he is not saying Apple will fail in the consumer market due to its integrated hardware/software model, he limits that remark to the enterprise market.

which tells me MS knows Apple will keep pushing up its home consumer market share substantially, but MS is determined to hang on to its worldwide enterprise hegemony, and he believes it can - and that it has to. that is where the big bucks are for MS - all the enterprise fees and services - not selling cheap Windows licenses to OEM's for home computers.

Apple could establish a modest but significant presence in the US enterprise market if it really tried really hard, but i don't believe it will. it's a different mind set, to be a services company (look at MobileMe).

But there is one potential competitor that really could take on and take half or more of MS's enterprise business away: Oracle! and given the size of Larry Ellison's ego, i bet one day they do.

Windows will mainly be a corporate thing, stuck with by companies who are currently already heavily invested in Windows, or chosen by home users who are resistant to change.

Google OS will be hot off the heels of Android/Chrome, given away for free to manufacturers. It will be simple, easy and quick and very popular with home users, education and corporations looking for low cost computers (computers themselves may be heavily subsidised if Google AdWords are implemented into the OS - we're talking $99 laptops). It will be embraced by developing nations as the OS of choice.

Mac will be the superior system, with its growth constrained only by the higher prices which makes them unattainable for many. That said, due to its profit margins, Apple will be the wealthiest company.

Linux will be a solid open source community developed OS, but not widely embraced by general consumers.

As many more devices become more like mini-computers, the 'Other' category will grow.

And then 2028? Who knows...

IMO-Google will struggle to have 10% of the phone OS market in ten years.
Googles theoretical prospects of capturing more than 1% of the PC OS market is slim.
Lots of companies could provide very cheap PC's if it was viable.In some markets it is feasible but not eneough to take more than about 1% of the market share.People will overall be able to pay for an increasingly affordable Apple system of one kind or another.
Apple will have an astonishing 50% of the PC OS market in five years ( end of fiscal year 2013) withought including it's mobile OSX platform on phones, iPods, tablets and revolutionary wifi enabled gadgets(mass produced beacons)
The big market share loser being MS.

"Ballmer blackout tumbles on!"

"Islam is as dangerous in a man as rabies in a dog"~ Sir Winston Churchill. We are nurturing a nightmare that will haunt our children, and kill theirs.

if you read Ballmer's comment at the end carefully, he is not saying Apple will fail in the consumer market due to its integrated hardware/software model, he limits that remark to the enterprise market.

Exactly, and many people fail to understand that the enterprise market has nothing to do with the home user market. The rules are just not the same.
Many people make that mistake, for instance when they claim that Linux big advantage is that it's free. In the real enterprise world, Linux is barely less expensive than Windows. Anyway, if you're using your OS to run softwares like Autocad, Oracle, Websphere or a big CMS, the cost of the OS is dwarfed by the cost of the software and their maintainance.

Likewise, the OS is much less important than for a home user. On servers, you don't see the GUI most of the time anyway - hence why Linux works well on servers. But even on the desktop, most corporate users will spend their days using only a couple of applications. I just launch a few applications every time I reboot Windows, and that's about once a month, and they stay open day after day. My interaction with the OS is minimum - and as a developer, I'm considered a user with special needs in the enterprise context.
The OS is merely an application launcher. That's why enterprises are so slow to adopt Vista. Or even XP. Most of their needs are already covered by Windows 2000...

Quote:

Apple could establish a modest but significant presence in the US enterprise market if it really tried really hard, but i don't believe it will. it's a different mind set, to be a services company (look at MobileMe).

I don't think it could, the gap is just too wide between Apple and the enterprise world.
You have no widely recognized certifications for Mac admins - something both Windows and Linux have. Any major company is able to hire certified admins for Linux or Windows with little risks thanks to the certification system. With Mac, that would be a complete gamble. With the added cost that Mac admins are a rarity.
Likewise, Mac computers are very expensive. Even worse, there is a gap between the iMac and the Mac Pro that is exactly where companies have their needs. You can't afford to buy Mac Pros for every developers, graphists...

Quote:

But there is one potential competitor that really could take on and take half or more of MS's enterprise business away: Oracle! and given the size of Larry Ellison's ego, i bet one day they do.

I would also put my bets on Google... The current context is to move more and more business applications to web applications. They suit most business needs and they bring a lot of good things to the balance.
Web applications run fine on Linux servers (with Oracle, Java, Websphere...). And they run extremelly well on Google Chrome. Once Google stabilises its browser, it will be one of the best platform to run web applications on - because it's actually designed from scratch to do that. While Internet Explorer is one of the worst.
In this context, what do you need Windows (or MacOS) for? You don't need it on the server side and on the client side you only need it to run Google Chrome...

If Apple was no threat to MS then he would not even talk about them.
The fact that he is spending so much time and effort trying to 'put down' the competition shows how wrong he it. In fact he is just giving Apple more free publicity every time he mentions them.

IMO-Google will struggle to have 10% of the phone OS market in ten years.
Googles theoretical prospects of capturing more than 1% of the PC OS market is slim.
Lots of companies could provide very cheap PC's if it was viable.In some markets it is feasible but not eneough to take more than about 1% of the market share.People will overall be able to pay for an increasingly affordable Apple system of one kind or another.
Apple will have an astonishing 50% of the PC OS market in five years ( end of fiscal year 2013) withought including it's mobile OSX platform on phones, iPods, tablets and revolutionary wifi enabled gadgets(mass produced beacons)
The big market share loser being MS.

I have no clue where they calculuate < 1% for Linux, other than commercial install base being the benchmark.

As for 5% he's off his f'n rocker. The two desktops pushing the envelope will be OS X, then Linux and here is where the ball gets dropped by Microsoft with it's countless delays of future systems.

Big Iron Systems will have AIX, Solaris 15/OpenSolaris and the growth of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and more will continue to grow, as well.

Hell, Oracle is starting to offer their own Hardware with their Enterprise Databases and realizes that they need vertical differentiation to justify their pricing structure with competition from PostgreSQL, even MySQL, Sybase, Informix/DB2, and future Database design solutions yet to be resolved in the fields of Discrete Mathematics, Combinatorics and Tensor Calculus.

I was amazed to find that our Enterprise made the iphone available as a phone option!? Normally our organisation being a big one is slow to adopt new things but we had the iphone available very quickly (some pressure from the top I think).

From what I hear there been a lot of people requesting them now.

There's also an ongoing project looking at integrating Mac's into the enterprise and there's even talk about looking into iphone software development!?

I'm in software development myself and I can imagine a lot of enterprise mobile applications. Giving remote access to corporate employees on site for example. Development certainly looks more streamlines compared to windows mobile..

If IBM had acquired the exclusive rights to DOS, there would be no PC clones, IBM probably still dominate the PC market, and MS would not be the industrial hegemonist that it is now. This suboptimal solution of one platform - many hardware manufacturers is an accident of history that arose out of the above-mentioned special circumstances. For Ballmer to claim that it is naturally superior to one platform - one hardware manufacturer only reveals the depth of his misunderstanding.

You are right, I saw the movie Pirates of the Silicon Valley, and like my dad say, if IBM never open up DOS, MS is nobody. Steve Jobs made a mistake by bringing in Bill Gates too deep into Apple. I wonder if history will repeat it self with that 1 Google fella in Apple meeting.

Apple is a hardware company, dont believe me? Read this Article!. For those who understand my message, help me spread this info to those who dont get it.

Does it actually work yet? I tried it a few months ago, and it took 30 minutes just to load, and barely was able to do anything at all on then brand new iMac. I wrote it off as still beta for a reason (not ready yet).

30 minutes? Barely able to do anything? You've got to be kidding! I've been using it (NeoOffice / Open Office X11) for years as a viable substitute for MS Office. After the initial startup (MS cheats during bootup) which is still comfortably under 10 sec on a 2GHz Core Duo, its actually quite quick.

It also does a better job reading and writing files to various versions of MS Office better than MS Office does itself.

Apple has such enormous potential in its hands with the iPhone and I do worry that its attitude towards the development community at the moment leaves a lot to be desired and could be its undoing Vs. Android et. al.

Dear Mr. Language Police,

Your sentence above is a run-on. Also, you should not capitalize Vs. in the middle of a sentence and the latin word et should not be followed by a period. Additionally, vs. is an abbreviation of versus that you incorrectly use where you seem to mean something like "at the hands of ...."

Your sentence above is a run-on. Also, you should not capitalize Vs. in the middle of a sentence and the latin word et should not be followed by a period. Additionally, vs. is an abbreviation of versus that you incorrectly use where you seem to mean something like "at the hands of ...."

Touché . All good points apart from the suggestion that I shouldn't have used versus. Replace "versus" with "against" and the sentence makes sense. The point is that Apple is competing against (versus) a number of competitors in the smart-phone space; as it stands I think the market in 10 years' time is theirs to lose through actions they are taking right now.

...It succeeded in spite of it because IBM gifted them with a monopoly in the PC market. ... For Ballmer to claim that it is naturally superior to one platform - one hardware manufacturer only reveals the depth of his misunderstanding.

Holy crap! Someone else who broke through the "Reality Distortion Field" and can see the true reason for Microsoft's fortune. Well said!

Let's also not forget that it was Steve Jobs who asked Bill Gates to create an office suite for the Mac, when Apple already had their own in house office suite written for the Lisa. Furthermore, Apple was coerced into allowing Microsoft to port the Macintosh Toolbox API to DOS, so they could create their own GUI based office suite. Could you imagine what the OS/office landscape would look like now if Steve never went to Microsoft and just ported "7/7" from the Lisa?

Anyway, back on subject...

I don't remember Bill Gates ever being so vocal about Apple? Ballmer comes across as being an envious, spiteful, half-wit, who's going to take his ball home, if the others won't let him win. I suppose he has to say some of those things to put up a front for the stock holders sake, but come on man! Does he not realize that Apple's marketing is going to hit at Windows, not because they hate Windows, but because Microsoft has the dominant share of the market, they're the biggest target. Comparing Apple to say, Linux would be dumb, who could relate to those ads?

The thing that really gets me is the weird "smart" phone marketing. Why is everyone ONLY comparing their new phones to the iPhone? It's RIM Vs. iPhone, Android vs. iPhone, Nokia vs. iPhone, T-Mobile vs. iPhone, Windows Mobile vs. iPhone, etc... Why not Android vs. RIM or Nokia vs. Windows Mobile? iPhone is not the biggest kid on the block here (although it could quite possibly the loudest). The only explanation for this behavior is the iPhone is the new standard and EVERYONE else is trying to get there, but at the exact same time, they are all trying to play down the iPhone's benefits and play up it's flaws. Microsoft was famous for this hypocrisy; creating FUD, while trying to play catch-up.

Disclaimer: The things I say are merely my own personal opinion and may or may not be based on facts. At certain points in any discussion, sarcasm may ensue.

Ballmer similarly argued that Apple will fail to see further Mac share gains or make strides in the enterprise market because it won't license the Mac OS to third-party hardware vendors.

"Apple's a good company, I won't take anything away from them, but they have a certain kind of strategy," Ballmer said. "They believe in putting the hardware and software together, they don't believe in letting other people make it."

"I'm not saying there isn't a threat" he added. But if we "do our jobs right, there's really no reason Apple should get any footprint in the enterprise."

It's the high prices that keep Apple from growing out of its 5% niche of Mac faithfuls. If Steve Jobs waits any longer to lower prices drastically, he will be blamed for keeping Apple small when Apple could have grown its market share while Microsoft experienced a lukewarm reception for Vista.

The one man company is a formula for failure, especially if he is a one-man-knows-it-all type. If only Steve Jobs understood that much of business.

Does it actually work yet? I tried it a few months ago, and it took 30 minutes just to load, and barely was able to do anything at all on then brand new iMac. I wrote it off as still beta for a reason (not ready yet).

NeoOffice is a full-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and database programs) for Mac OS X. Based on the OpenOffice.org office suite, NeoOffice has integrated dozens of native Mac features and can import, edit, and exchange files with other popular office programs such as Microsoft Office.

NeoOffice is one of the most stable office suites for Mac OS X. We have created an office suite that is adapted to the unique needs of Mac users by taking the features in Sun Microsystems' OpenOffice.org office suite and adding improvements

Indeed, you're certainly not the only one. As far as I can see, the "iPhone halo effect" has a much greater potential to get people to switch to Macs than the "iPod halo effect". This is a very exciting prospect. I only hope that Apple doesn't fuck it up by pissing off all the iPhone developers. The fact that the NDA prevents discussion about iPhone development really is ridiculous and I hope Apple sorts it out soon.

Correcion: Apple has pissed off a handful of very vocal, IMO extremely whiny developers. The tech media (including John Gruber unfotunately, whose site I really dig) of course is blowing it all out of proportion.

Fact is, money talks, BS walks, and the evidence suggests that the vast majority of devs are pretty OK with Apple and the App Store.

I was amazed to find that our Enterprise made the iphone available as a phone option!? Normally our organisation being a big one is slow to adopt new things but we had the iphone available very quickly (some pressure from the top I think).

From what I hear there been a lot of people requesting them now.

There's also an ongoing project looking at integrating Mac's into the enterprise and there's even talk about looking into iphone software development!?

I'm in software development myself and I can imagine a lot of enterprise mobile applications. Giving remote access to corporate employees on site for example. Development certainly looks more streamlines compared to windows mobile..

I think we may be seeing an iphone halo effect in the enterprise!?

I recently did a gig for Axel Springer Verlag in Berlin (Germany's largest newspaper publisher and Apple's largest corporate customer to date) and everyone in upper management got a free iPhone + contract at the event. Lucky bastiges :-)

There are a going to be a lot of companies switching over to the iPhone very soon, mark my words.

Ballmer wants their competitor to make the mistake that MS made, so after that MS will launch their own Zune Phone and Ballmer will laugh at the competitor and he will say the opposite at what he said today(today as in the about the topic)

Just my speculation , haha

Apple is a hardware company, dont believe me? Read this Article!. For those who understand my message, help me spread this info to those who dont get it.

It's the high prices that keep Apple from growing out of its 5% niche of Mac faithfuls. If Steve Jobs waits any longer to lower prices drastically, he will be blamed for keeping Apple small when Apple could have grown its market share while Microsoft experienced a lukewarm reception for Vista.

The one man company is a formula for failure, especially if he is a one-man-knows-it-all type. If only Steve Jobs understood that much of business.

1. I'm quite sure that Jobs understands a lot more about business than you do.

2. If it weren't for Jobs and his team, Apple would be dead by now. Period.

3. Who ever said that Apple wants to get as big as MS? If I had the choice between making goo-gobs of money efficiently (which is exactly what Apple is doing now) and doing everything I can just to obtain market share (look where that got Dell nowadays), I'd rather choose the former.

Correcion: Apple has pissed off a handful of very vocal, IMO extremely whiny developers. The tech media (including John Gruber unfotunately, whose site I really dig) of course is blowing it all out of proportion.

Fact is, money talks, BS walks, and the evidence suggests that the vast majority of devs are pretty OK with Apple and the App Store.

I disagree. Yes, a handful are being excessively whiny, but that doesn't stop some complaints being legitimate. It's difficult to believe that there's a single iPhone developer out there who wouldn't be happier if they could freely talk with others about iPhone development. Apple has the opportunity here to become the defacto ultra-mobile computing platform, and they're shooting themselves in the foot by preventing people from taking about iPhone development. It doesn't make any sense! They should be fostering the development community; instead there is no community because you can't have community without communication.

not that great. Microsoft finally got it right with Office 2008 on the interface/"Macness" side of things (they even finally got around to using the proper installer.pkg approach to installation, rather than using that proprietary VISE rubbish). The problem is they simultaneously made it pathetically slow. Right now, there are no all-round good office suites for the Mac.

Office 2008 beats NeoOffice because NeoOffice has a horrible interface (looks way too much like a Windows port), and it's slow (being Java-based it'll never escape that).

Correcion: Apple has pissed off a handful of very vocal, IMO extremely whiny developers. .

I think you're confused.

The handful of whiny developers of which you speak are probably voicing the concerns of many more smaller developers who are afraid to speak out.

When the Mac faithful (Gruber, Jason Snell and Dan Moren) who not only drink the kool aid but help MAKE it acknowledge that there is a problem with the way Apple are handling developers and the app store, then you've got a problem.

This is NOT just a few people. It is everybody. We all are very very angry at Apple for providing a wonderful product and then gagging us. But more than that... we are angry that Apple has not provided any rules beyond "unforseen" as to what they will allow and won't.

Apple should have a different system in place. All apps that are not illegal on iPhone and are virus free, and fit certain rules, codesign them and let developers sell them via their own means. App Store gets its own, more high quality game selection, as well as the free ones.

Apple shot themselves in the foot by restricting developers so much. Sure, protecting the device is important, as its very personal and easy to hack by a good hacker to get ur details. But restricting it because they don't LIKE what is on the device is WAY TOO MUCH control. They need set guidelines, not a general "we will block unforseen apps we don't like" that we have at the moment.

Why is he still the CEO of Microsoft? He doesn't know much about technology, the company's stock has dropped its value by 50% since he took over in January 2000, he's not even a good salesman (which is his only strength), and he's a raving lunatic.

LOL of course, let's all be rational and compare stock prices during the 2000 tech bubble to today's near-depression economy. Can you at least try to not sound like an ignorant zealot?

Ballmer has had more revenue growth, income growth, marketshare growth, and business growth than almost any other CEO in history, including Bill Gates. But of course, all that matters is stock price. But only as long as Apple's is not in a nose dive like a few years ago, otherwise it suddenly stops being important.

You're right. All previous PC owners I know who turned to Mac owners couldn't be happier. There's no going back.

It's funny that Ballmer believes that the enterprise stays firmly in MS hands.
Even enterprise customers are recognizing that the cost of ownership through support and licensing makes MS anything but cheap. Used to be that IT blindly pushed PC's to minimize support costs.

That is changing though and from the IT perspective I see a complete reversal towards the Mac. Where they used to joke about Mac's as toys I can now barely find anyone in our data center that doesn't use some sort Macbook.

Guys with PC laptops are simply viewed as old school

I am looking at guys administering over 100 Dell servers using a Mac. Along with employees requesting Macs & the iPhone for their work, this recognition in IT is how the enterprise gets to see more and more Macs.
Which is a good thing...

This is NOT just a few people. It is everybody. We all are very very angry at Apple for providing a wonderful product and then gagging us. But more than that... we are angry that Apple has not provided any rules beyond "unforseen" as to what they will allow and won't.

Apple should have a different system in place. All apps that are not illegal on iPhone and are virus free, and fit certain rules, codesign them and let developers sell them via their own means. App Store gets its own, more high quality game selection, as well as the free ones.

Apple shot themselves in the foot by restricting developers so much. Sure, protecting the device is important, as its very personal and easy to hack by a good hacker to get ur details. But restricting it because they don't LIKE what is on the device is WAY TOO MUCH control. They need set guidelines, not a general "we will block unforseen apps we don't like" that we have at the moment.

You heard that people?! So lemme hear the arguments that they are "whiners" again. Explain it to me how they are whiners.

not that great. Microsoft finally got it right with Office 2008 on the interface/"Macness" side of things (they even finally got around to using the proper installer.pkg approach to installation, rather than using that proprietary VISE rubbish). The problem is they simultaneously made it pathetically slow. Right now, there are no all-round good office suites for the Mac.

Office 2008 beats NeoOffice because NeoOffice has a horrible interface (looks way too much like a Windows port), and it's slow (being Java-based it'll never escape that).

Frankly, we couldn't give a shit about the MS eye candy that uses far too much screen space, and NeoOffice is really not that slow, particularly on a current machine. Furthermore, we refuse to pay the MS tax because we've learned to despise the crap from Redmond due to compatibility issues between versions within their own product line. We simply need to get work done and nobody we work with has ever detected that we are not using the "real thing." Besides, some of the best trading platforms and direct access exchange interfaces we use are Java based. When trading millions of dollars of other people's money, stability and functionality are far more important than looks.

As a hedge fund manager, we construct and distribute complex models to our staff for explaining our risk analysis techniques to our clients. There's never been a problem with compatibility or performance. All of the machines in our offices are either Linux or Mac based (Mac Pro) workstations running our own software that exports spreadsheet-based models. Our inhouse developers use Java and C++. In the "old days" we used Sun workstations.

1) The iPhone is in the honeymoon phase. It's new, it's shiny, and it's pretty well done. But there are cracks in the façade - see the AppStore whining and developer relations. I think it is certainly here to stay, but I don't think it's going to take over the world and usher in a new era of cell phone bliss. I think one of its biggest contributions will be to push the quality of web browsers on cell phones.

2) MS has screwed up big time with Vista. I don't know who they were targeting with it. Business/Enterprise doesn't care about the Aero GUI whiz-bang stuff. And MS seems to have added enough complexity and under the hood changes that businesses are gun shy to move away from their "tried and true" XP systems. Vista is a resource hog on home systems and the brief times I've spent with it, it seems to try to out think the user and be too clever for its own good - just get out of the way and let me work! Oh, and it's a design-by-committee disaster, too.

4) Ballmer does appear completely out of touch. He doesn't understand the QUALITY that goes into an Apple product. He has no taste, and there doesn't appear to be anyone high up the MS management food chain with any sense of quality, either. (The story of the XBox 360 is fascinating here. They KNEW it was going to fail in vast numbers. They intentionally released a faulty product in order to get to market sooner! They ate millions & millions of dollars replacing boxes they knew were going to break. Jobs would never stand for shenanigans like that.)

5) Apple will "fail" under the weight of their own success just like MS, Sun, GM, Sony, and others before them. Size leads to inertia, more layers of management, more internal politics, etc.

"Microsoft is left as the last vendor trying to sell a commercial software platform for smartphones"

What a ridiculous statement. Apple's platform is locked to their hardware... they neither selling it, or giving it away on its own.

Apple is the only one charging users to *develop* for their closed platform and to also to take a slice of any app sales, if you are lucky enough that they deem your app suitable for the AppStore...

The only real threat is Google, and it will hit Apple first.

" Nokia leads the worldwide smartphone market with a 30 percent share. "If you want to reach more than that, you have to separate the hardware and software in the platform,"

And provide mobile office applications.... where are they Apple?? A smartphone should be/is far more than web + mail + games... it should be a mobile office!!

"In the fourth quarter of 2007, Apple grabbed 7% of the worldwide smartphone share, despite being limited to one model and primarily one provider in one country."

Breaking News!!! 7% is a lot less than 30%!!! The crux of his argument is can Apple beat 30%/Nokia/MS with one model, one provider whilst continuing to tie the software to the hardware (and the rest of the product line)?

MS will not copy Apple's business model, it would destroy them. They will bring elements of the integrated user experience to their platform.

Smaller scale perhaps, but then Apple is on a smaller scale and its likely a sign of things to come if Apple continues to spread itself too thin.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jasenj1

Here's my opinions that're worth every cent you pay to read them.

1) The iPhone is in the honeymoon phase. It's new, it's shiny, and it's pretty well done. But there are cracks in the façade - see the AppStore whining and developer relations. I think it is certainly here to stay, but I don't think it's going to take over the world and usher in a new era of cell phone bliss. I think one of its biggest contributions will be to push the quality of web browsers on cell phones.

2) MS has screwed up big time with Vista. I don't know who they were targeting with it. Business/Enterprise doesn't care about the Aero GUI whiz-bang stuff. And MS seems to have added enough complexity and under the hood changes that businesses are gun shy to move away from their "tried and true" XP systems. Vista is a resource hog on home systems and the brief times I've spent with it, it seems to try to out think the user and be too clever for its own good - just get out of the way and let me work! Oh, and it's a design-by-committee disaster, too.

4) Ballmer does appear completely out of touch. He doesn't understand the QUALITY that goes into an Apple product. He has no taste, and there doesn't appear to be anyone high up the MS management food chain with any sense of quality, either. (The story of the XBox 360 is fascinating here. They KNEW it was going to fail in vast numbers. They intentionally released a faulty product in order to get to market sooner! They ate millions & millions of dollars replacing boxes they knew were going to break. Jobs would never stand for shenanigans like that.)

5) Apple will "fail" under the weight of their own success just like MS, Sun, GM, Sony, and others before them. Size leads to inertia, more layers of management, more internal politics, etc.

Is there anyone out there who thinks Microsoft has a clue when in comes to future technology directions, innovation, etc.?

I think Apple owns that franchise.

Microsoft is not in the technology business. Nor in the innovation business. They're in the marketing business. It's about bundling and deal making for them.

Microsoft's greatest (only?) successes have come from copying others. They ripped off spreadheets from Lotus. Word processing from Word Perfect. Operating systems from Apple. And many many more. They are such major league pirates and yet they have the gall to rail against software piracy.

This is a great point here. M$ made money by being the conduit where by hardware talked to software. So, davesmall, is right on here - that is not innovation, it is positioning (and marketing). Furthermore, cases like Xbox 360 and Zune highlight the lack of innovation. Another case in point was made in the articles on Snow Leopard going to full 64-bit while Vista emulated 64-bit using a 32-bit approach (sorry if this is poorly worded - not my strength).

Oh, did I mention their ads? Brilliant innovation at its finest! (Thanks Mr. H! )

Apple has succeeded based on Jobs and company persistent attention to innovation to survive and grow the company.

M$ is not on solid ground innovation-wise. Blunt force trauma-wise, M$ IS a master at this.

His mistake parallels that of many media outlets. They report the news they way they WANT it to be, rather than the way it IS.

He's living proof that you only need a sub-par intellect to work at MS, or be a CEO for that matter.

A number of posts have made comments about Ballmer, Gates, and Dell not being "smart". I believe they are quite smart and we are missing the point here.

What is off here is perspective, not intelligence. Jobs held the perspective that opening Apple computers system to the world was not a smart path and it nearly didn't survive. Ballmer, Gates, and Dell hold a business approach that has worked quite well. Optimal? Not necessarily yet any company that holds 90% market share is doing a lot of things right.

There is a difference between a product made with passion and a product made for money. Of course everything needs money to roll in this world, but if money is the main concern, you will get product like Vista, if passion is the first priority and money second, then you will get wonderful product like the Leopard. Which would you choose?

Its proven that when you put passion into building something, the end product WILL always be better then a product that is build just to give more money.

Which company would go to the extend that Apple is doing? Its a major risk that Apple did not build in a dvd player in the MBA but hey, people who own the MBA seem not making a big deal of not having a build in DVD player because they realize that they rarely use it.

Apple is a hardware company, dont believe me? Read this Article!. For those who understand my message, help me spread this info to those who dont get it.

A number of posts have made comments about Ballmer, Gates, and Dell not being "smart". I believe they are quite smart and we are missing the point here.

What is off here is perspective, not intelligence. Jobs held the perspective that opening Apple computers system to the world was not a smart path and it nearly didn't survive. Ballmer, Gates, and Dell hold a business approach that has worked quite well. Optimal? Not necessarily yet any company that holds 90% market share is doing a lot of things right.

Perspective cannot be divorced so easily from intelligence. There are mounds of evidence in the world to back that up.

For argument's sake, let's assume that your 90% figure is accurate. Your statement assumes that Ballmer is someone who has contributed to that figure, rather than taking a ride on coattails. His influence may only have been the result of Gates' direct presence rather than independent thought. Time will tell, but I'm betting that 90% figure won't hold and Ballmer will be gone within two years.

"I'm not saying there isn't a threat [from Apple]," he added. But if we "do our jobs right, there's really no reason Apple should get any footprint in the enterprise."

Translation: If we bully and blackmail enough potential Mac adopters, Apple's penetration into the Enterprise market will be thwarted.

Balmer is a ruthless thug talking to morons who don't understand that Microsoft talks about "infinite choice" while doing everything in its power to limit the actual choice to Microsoft products. This cut-throat strategy has worked very well for them in the past. But tomorrow is another day!

Plus while we're at it, can we do away with the niche marketing strategy. Why is ATT the only provider in the USA and how again does this benefit Apple?

Don't forget that to get the deal done three or four years ago, Apple, who still seen as a one-hit wonder with the maturing iPod, had to convince an entrenched, old-school wireless provider to ditch their business model. It was not a trivial matter to get AT&T to change the game, including doing away with giveaway phones, charging a flat fee for unlimited data access, etc. Remember, Apple didn't even have a functioning prototype until late 2006.

As it was, they signed up for an AT&T exclusive, because that was the best deal they could get. If that deal was done today, I'm sure it would be more in Apple's (and our) favor.